Murmansk-13

Jovan Peralta was dead. After Tor blacked out, Tala and Mihailov had tried to staunch the flow of blood from the ragged wound inflicted upon him by Nikolai’s teeth. The attack had torn out most of the crucial veins and arteries down the right side of his neck. Tor woke to his remaining party attempting to revive the bosun, his face slack and blanched in a unison not matched in life. His dead eyes scrutinizing the Captain who’d failed him.

It was Tor who’d told Tala to stop, no longer able to hold Peralta’s glazed stare.

Peralta had never been a friend of Tor’s, no Pinoy was ever a true friend of a European superior. Generally the various ethnic groups kept to themselves in space and the status quo was maintained with separate dayrooms and mess halls. By day they worked together, but by night they headed into their own cultural spaces. Tor had always believed it was the burden of deference, the Filipino’s were almost unilaterally respectful of their seniors to a fault. They surely sought equality in their down time.

However, once Filipino’s started becoming officers and professional equals, Tor soon discovered it was simply willing cultural apartheid. The Pinoy no more wanted to spend their past times hard drinking with the Europeans than the European’s wanted to spend it with the Pinoy crooning to karaoke ballads.

Regardless, Tor wanted to mourn Peralta, tried to. Peralta had flown with him on several voyages and was more than once the man who shook his hand as he boarded for a trip and the last one to shake it as he signed off. Loyal and imperturbable, he’d been a hard worker ready for retirement, but when it boiled down to it, all Tor could offer for Peralta were qualities based on rank. For all the time he’d flown with him, he couldn’t offer one anecdote pertaining to his character; had no idea what lay ahead for the old bosun when he signed off for the final time – or what had proceeded. In many ways he found that sadder, that he couldn’t shed a tear for his dead crewman only tally him as another soul lost under his command on this disastrous trip.

In the flickering darkness of the corridor, Tor saw Tala’s eyes focus on his legs as she sucked air into her lungs. The right leg of his EVA suit was still crimson pink with Peralta’s blood, Tor having collapsed with his limb between his colleagues pumping heart and the morgue scupper. He supposed Tala was angry at him, at his lack of intervention, his lack of command or obvious cowardice. Tor supposed she wasn’t wrong to be angry with him.

Katja was also streaked with gore. Intermittently she scolded her captors for killing her father as they’d dragged her from the morgue and through the desolate laboratories. Katja’s long dormant mind apparently weaving a tapestry whereby her father hadn’t been reduced to a feral psychopath. She emitted a plaintive sob in the flickering darkness of floor fourteen but didn’t struggle.

“We should have fucking sedated her,” Mihailov said, his voice edgy as he cast about in the half shadows.

“We need to find escape suits,” replied Tor ignoring the Second Mate, watching his breath condensate in the dim.

“We need to get the fuck out of here,” replied Mihailov, the tap of his pacing feet irritating to the ear.

“Then we need escape suits.”

“Fuck!” Mihailov wheeled against the bulkhead and smashed his boot into the veneered plastic, cracking it with a dull boom. “Fuck!”

Tor winced at the noise as it echoed away into the stairwell beyond the swing doors. Katja screamed and flinched but remained otherwise prone on the board.

“Are you going to help us, Captain?” Tala’s disembodied question was filled with thinly veiled contempt.

Tor grimaced at the rebuke. Fighting a body wracked with agonies, he pushed himself to his feet and met Tala’s swollen-closed eyes in the flicker of an emergency light. The Filipina turned in the corridor and paced away, toward the crew cabins. Tor let his head cool against the bulkhead a moment before stiffly following her.

☣☭☠

The infected were on the move and slowly closing on Jamal’s position. With his hands pressed gently into the thin metallic walls of the air duct, Jamal shifted his centre of gravity away from the base, careful not to crinkle the aluminium beneath him. Thin tendrils of air wept upward, through the ducts intermittent grates, the stations musk of burnt plastic and ozone increasingly traced with putrefied flesh. The stench grew stronger and now Jamal could hear their shambling footfalls and low, guttural wailing not far behind.

They’d been gaining on him for a quarter hour, perhaps less. Jamal had no means of counting time as he wended through the stations ducting, devoid of visual clues. He could move swiftly through the labyrinthine shafts and conduits, far quicker than the infected could typically move.

Unless they’d picked up a scent.